Automaton Assemble
by emersoncod
Summary: AU. In a universe where Yggdrasil extends to Middle Earth and Westeros, gigantic leviathans have sprang from the Earth, Cybermen and Daleks squabble over the Earth's remains, and Coriolanus Snow harvests the orphans of celebrities, Phil Coulson must unite the scattered children of the dead Avengers and seek help; from their living parents in another universe.


_The year is 2014, there are ten minutes, and the scene is thus;_

Unfettered by the pressures of court or the eyes of the courtiers, a king dressed in simple Norwegian finery present at the kitchen table, gold-tooled boots on the table, a huge bull-headed hammer propped up against the boards. There is the smell of wood heating under an alien sun, children far beyond playing with magic in the grounds, the brief snatches of servants talking swiftly in a strange, fluid language outside. The king's hair is tied back in one gold twist, and his thick leather arm brace bears the elegant 'A' that tells of his companions on Midgard, the sleek parallel cuts on the bicep telling of the battles he has endured with his companions on Asgard. His mortal wife and older son are in the antechamber, their eyes to the skies, her hands – he knows them well – sketching out the world tree, whose limbs have only stretched further through her brilliant mind, bringing them into a new age of Asgardian wealth. Unscrolled, a long map, newly altered with their recent discoveries, mingles with the wood grain of the table, the gold letters etched deep in glowing when the heat of skin presses against them. A baby girl with lightning-white hair is perched in the king's lap, and he spells out '_Erebor_' with her tiny finger, the dwarf kingdom of her brother's foster father that lay in the newly discovered Middle Earth roots of Yggdrasil, and '_Westeros_', the land discovered in Yggdrasil's leaves, that was promised to her when she should marry its prince, Viserys.

The ozone-eyed child will never marry her beloved. His father Aerys Targaryen was toppled, although they know it not, five seconds ago, and soon she will inherit all the pain and bleakness and loneliness of the Summer Isles, torn asunder from her brother in a desperate attempt to save her life, the siblings thrown apart to two opposite ends of their father's kingdom.

This is Thor.

_Another._

New York, this time, a blue-gray-black skyscraper line dominated by a pointed stack of expensive interior design and billion-dollar machinery. Inside this tower nearly every room is empty. In one, there is not a boy, but the mark of a boy, sticky handprints on low glass tables, the leg of an action figure under a sofa, an oily tool kit crafted specifically for small, toddling hands. The boy is called Peter, he is two, and he is currently at his Uncle Rhodey's, making cupcakes with his wife Joanna and their teenage daughter Lacey.

His father and mother are on a date night, driving back from a steak house. The father is like his boy, with brown skin and liquid dark eyes. His head is on his wife's chest, and he is making her laugh, and also telling her about how much he loves her, and how much he loves the small boy called Peter, although those words are not spoken. The mother has long, strawberry-blonde hair, and as she strokes her husband's thick hair it spills across his dark head in silky red strips.

_This is Tony and Pepper._

Another red-headed woman is important in this tale, although she is in Russia, and is grinding white powder into wine, a wine that matches the deep purple of her dress and the sparkling chandelier hoisted above. She has the lips of a siren and the smile of a dagger, and as she hands the wine to the thick-bodied, bleary-eyed gangster seated nearby, her teeth are gritted in her pretty mouth. This is uncommon, for the woman. The woman has slid out of every shadow the world since she was in employment and has held her emotions in check for longer, but here she is, anger in her smile, handing death to this man, alone, in this empty club.

The woman flickers her eyes up, and she briefly imagines her husband crouched there with an arrow nocked to his bow, the blood-red sighting point skipping over the back of the decaying Communist swallowing his wine. She blinks, and the vision is gone. She reminds herself that her husband is hundreds of miles away in Miami, with their daughters, teaching them how to shoot tin cans on the beach.

She reminds herself that if her husband had known what this man would have done, he would not have taken her offer of a holiday with their children. He would have taken his bluntest arrow and driven the point himself, slowly, through the Communist's throat. The woman smiles again, seeing the man begin to convulse as every muscle in his body succumbed to that special, terrible poison only one spider in the world produced. She can almost see each nerve begin to inflate, irritate and burst.

There is the rhythmic wingbeat of helicopter blades outside; her escape route is here. The woman looks closely at the man coughing out his throat, this memory to be stored later, to be taken out and savoured. She slips out of her dress, slides it across the empty dance floor, slips on her fur-lined catsuit with equal ease. She turns to walk away. Stops. Turns back. Approaches the dying man.

"When they ask you why you are in hell," she says, calmly, into the shell of his ear. "Tell them, you told a gunman to bring death to the Barton children."

She leans closer, and her thumb comes in, breaking the fragile bones with one practised movement. "Tell them," she says, over the screams. "Tell them I heard."

This is Natasha. The man in her mind, not the bloody corpse she has left in the deserted club in Moscow, that man is Clint.

_Tokyo. A flat pink sky of setting sun, and there is an air of danger in the air, of worry and discord._

People crowd the streets, calling to each other, eyebrows furrowed and car keys gripped tightly in hands, rucksacks and suitcases and children hoisted on shoulders and the angry roar of jammed traffic saturating every distorted image in rough black smoke. A man is standing in the middle of these people, a man with curly hair and thin patches on elbows where his cheap shirt is wearing away. He is holding a shopping bag in one hand, and his wallet in the other, inside of which there is a dog-eared photo; a tall woman with a mole on her chin and an elfin little girl, dressed in red and green for Christmas and grinning fiercely around a brand new hover-bike, where, if a magnifying glass could be procured, the tiny print of 'From Uncle Tony' can be seen scripted on the label. The man is thinking hard about the woman and the girl, and the apples in the shopping bag he bought for the little girl that are being bruised by the crowd, and he is trying to suppress an unquenchable rage that is coating his tongue in acid.

This is Bruce, and he will be the first to die.

_There is no need for an introduction for this man_. His face has graced every brand of merchandise available, his aquiline profile the silhouette bringing hope to every weary soldier in the barracks, his rippling yellow hair and kind blue eyes the pinnacle of American triumph.

This is Captain America, and he has just hit his wife.

The circumstances were thus; one Peggy Carter, angry, tear-stained, chopping vegetables by the kitchen sink with all the super-human strength she can muster from her bare, muscled arms. Add one Rose Rogers; tiny, blonde, bronze-eyed as her mother, awake in her cot upstairs and cooing to the starfish on her blanket. Minus one Bucky Barnes; the empty shadow at the kitchen table, the mark of a slipped metal finger on the doorframe, the lingering sound of a broken voice crying out in nightmares – and Peggy's, quieter, braver, soft as a lioness's low rumble, soothing the cracks in James Barnes's mind and warming his shaking body with her dimpled smile. It is perhaps not the unflinching kindness of her husband, but her clear voice and gun-steady hands have inspired affection in the Winter Soldier's heart.

Perhaps more than affection.

And finally, one Steve Rogers, watching his wife by the toast rack and desperately, desperately wanting to hold her. His chest aches, wanting to be pulled against the soft form silhouetted by late evening light by the sink, the sweat on the back of her neck, her long skirt, her shoulders in that dress. He cannot repress it; he reaches for her, like a child, and she pulls away, the fresh tears that start down her cheeks starting to shimmer down his own. "Peggy," he says, brokenly, reaching for her again. "Peggy, Peggy _please._"

What Peggy is pulling away from is not her husband's arms, but the memory of those same arms around the shadow at the table. Those fingers in Bucky's tangled brown hair, Bucky's eyes, frightened and ecstatic all at the same time, settling briefly on Steve's mouth curved impulsively against his, and then landing on Peggy, shocked, at the door; the pupils dilated, he jerked away from Steve – Steve, hurt, does not see his wife behind him, and reaches, just like he does now, for Bucky – the smaller man rips away, staggers back; he looks at Peggy. He drinks in her image. Lingering. Agonizing. An apology crosses his mind, but not the room. And then he slammed the outside door shut behind him.

There are many things that were seen that night in husband and wife – a strange, unhappy grief at losing, not only their dearest friend but each other, in a way. But there are many things they do not see. The moving truck, the bleached hair, the beat of the crowds and tough boots, the backwoods train ticket stubs, a passing vicar pulling a blanket around a hunched, defeated shape on a street corner; the first snow of London settling on bowed shoulders. Not even the kiss he gives Rose when he climbs into her bedroom window that long, long night, the faint touch of his lips once again on Peggy's chestnut hair spilled out on her pillow, the way he looks at Steve from a distance, stood over the sofa where the man is curled, alone.

Steve Rogers has hit his wife, not with his fists, but with his boundless and uncertain love. He will regret this, when her blood is in the sink, six minutes later.

_Six minutes._

S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters is alive with red screens and hundreds of warning signals going off simultaneously; Phil Coulson walks away from the map of the Pacific Ocean floor, the thunderous fissure that is about to explode underneath, and passes a stairwell, climbs down three corridors, finds the Tesseract in its cradle all those fathoms underneath the Earth, all those energy signals they had sent out that something underneath had heard. They were worried about the monsters from space. He pulls out his phone, sends a short, damning text to six recipients.

Above him, when the screams start to begin, he will still be there, his finger pressed firmly into the teleport mechanism. He will save them.

He will also destroy himself.

_Five minutes._

Bruce's wife is already dead. Japan is in ruins. Bruce has his daughter in his arms, and he is running through a blackened street, jumping over bodies and rubble alike. His mind is a blank, endless vessel of green fire, seeping into his nerves and his limbs. "Mako, Mako, Mako," he is saying, over and over again, over his daughter's sobs. It is the only thing keeping him sane.

He sets his daughter down – her red shoe falls off, and she picks it up, still crying.

"Stay here," he says. "Come here. I love you. I'll come back. I love you." Mako stops crying. Her father has never lied to her. Bruce straightens up, walks away. Begins to unbutton his shirt.

Mako Banner watches from the fog as Bruce rips his flesh off and throws his fist into the emerging Kaiju's skull. Her eyes are still filled with tears, and so only an emerald blur sinks again and again under the monster, the roars of fury subsiding quickly to ones of pain. It reminds her of when she was kidnapped when she was three, and when the bad men threw her desperately into the water – a last ditch attempt, she would never know, to dissuade the figure that had tracked them relentlessly through the darkest mountains, the figure that had crushed the skulls of the entirety of their group with his bare hands – she could only see her father, as he ran at them, ripple into another; the weird silence of the deep cushioned the screams, and when finally she - coughing, spluttering, but alive - was lifted gently through the surface, that blunt, huge face stared at her with familiar eyes. The framework is distorted, the structures beneath the canvas stretched and buckling, but she knows this face, knows it with that untarnishable certainty that the sky is blue and her mother is warm. Mako does not fear The Hulk. But she fears for him.

The Hulk flies back in a flurry of dark green blood and lacerated flesh – his shaking, battered body rises quivering from the ash and soot. Eyes ringed in bruises search the landscape; The Hulk finds Mako, regards her. He reaches out a thick hand for his daughter.

Teeth emerge from the darkness.

Bruce dies.

_Four minutes._

Phil Coulson is no longer in this world. He has opened the breach, and has been sucked through it. From the pale blue veins of Yggdrasil erupting all over Midgard, he is somewhere amongst the push and pull of the cosmos, watching monsters pour in from the universes beyond.

Far, far in the twinkling beauty of chaos and stars, he sees him, riding the waves of the fractured universes, the Gauntlet shimmering on his wrist. He cannot see his blood-purple face. But he knows he is smiling.

Thanos the Destroyer can smile all he likes. The Tesseract lies in Coulson's pocket, and there it will lie for the rest of eternity.

He closes his eyes.

_The third minute, two years before._ A different universe, and in it, a few months before Jackie Tyler's first anniversary. The big bed is empty, and she's sitting on the floor with her back against the frame. There's an unlit cigarette on her lap – she plays with the idea of lighting it, stinking up the room so that when Pete comes back from his stupid 'entrepreneurial' meeting with his mates he'd gag. Whatever. She knows he's just downing a few pints, flirting with the barmaid.

The cream paint that they'd bought cheap to cover up the mould of their crappy apartment is starting to peel, and she moves a cup of cold tea out the way of a falling flake. She can feel a deep, unhappy bubble starting to expand in her stomach. Her tracksuit isn't warm enough, and the boiler's been switched off since last Monday so her hands are freezing. She pinches her fingers, takes the bobble out of her hair, and lets it fall across her shoulders in a peroxide-yellow wave. Pete used to love her hair down - _why does she bother even dyeing it anymore? He'd not notice anyhow. _She remembers how tough and flirty she was, way back when she first met Pete, how he'd take her out in his rusty Toyota to the edge of the park. They'd mess around and her mum would say that she'd be pregnant and penniless before any time soon, but the idea of a baby didn't scare her. She liked the idea of it – something cuddly and small and warm to love. They'd tried and tried but they didn't seem to get anywhere. She imagined Pete pushing the pram to the supermarket, popping grapes from the baskets into an eager little mouth. He might even want to spend more time at home.

Jackie lights the cigarette.

After letting the smoke trickle around the floor, she stands up, and goes to the window. The sky is a lovely sapphire blue outside, where the sunset has just started to fade away. A bright confetti of stars has already started to peek through above the estate. A tramp has collapsed by the flats, lonely and pathetic, a bundle in his filthy lap. The cigarette burns away on the window ledge; Jackie starts to cry.

_Two minutes._

A flat, blank computer screen, surrounded by a bank of dead telephones. A lightless room. A blip travels across in a pixelated blur, quick as a thought – letters begin to appear.

S

Two gloved hands reach forward, inputs swiftly on a sleek keyboard a response.

_Who are you? _

N.

_Press the small red panel on your left. _

A brief silence. A message flashes again.

' . P

A sigh of irritation. His fingers move silently across the board.

_Try again. _

Another, shorter silence. It is broken quickly by a crackling in the comm link tabbed on the screen.

"Hello?"

A broken, tear-choked voice. He can hear the youth in it, bring up the image in his mind that he was shown, once, in the back of a wallet – sapphire eyes, short coarse hair of the brightest living gold. A four-year old picture of innocence, a Primrose Barton that had little changed from the grainy photo of a crying baby, a photo he had bartered weapons for three years previous. There's a rustling of clothes as Prim moves away from the microphone, followed by a quiet, soothing _shhhh. _The comm link crackles again – a clear, firm voice echoes through the speaker.

"Who is this?"

"My name is Corin Frost. Are you Katniss Barton?"

"You're a liar. Who is this?"

The room is dark, but the silent curve of the man's lips reveal white, bright teeth. A faint miasma of red clings to the underside of each porcelain crown; he leans forward.

"A woman said those words to me once, when I tried to help her. You Romanoffs have always been distrustful."

A sharp breath is sucked in on the other side of the comm link. He can almost hear the trickle of tears down her cheek. He's impressed; her voice betrays no emotion.

"Do you know where my mother is?"

"No."

He hears a stifled sob – again, the shushing, not unkindly. Katniss returns to the mike.

"Do you know where my father is?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"I can't tell you."

A beat. "Fine." She pushes on. "We need help."

"I can give you it. Where are you?"

"Miami." Katniss's voice trembles a little, and when she speaks, she for the first time sounds like her eight years. "We were on the beach, and the waves started to get really rough, so Da – my father took us back to the car. He seemed - worried."

"Did he try calling your mother?"

"Yes. Several times. As soon as we got on the freeway he got a text."

"What did it say?"

"I don't know if I read it right, but it was something like - 'we're – companied?'. It couldn't see it clearly."

"Who was it from?"

There's no trace of irony in her voice. "I can't tell you."

He taps his fingers lightly on his armrest, a sure sign of annoyance, but he lets it slide. "I didn't understand it, but it was something bad. My father nearly swerved the car. There were people walking about outside, but he still told me to get the bow out from under the back seat. He told me that whatever happens –"A heavy, trembling sigh. "Whatever happens, to look after Prim. He went to hug Prim and we saw something in the sky –"

Prim let out a wail, and Katniss said something in a snapping, almost hysterical voice – he heard a scuffle on the other end of the link. "Katniss? Primrose?"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he heard Katniss whisper, over the din of feedback and the struggle. "Please, Prim, be quiet, _please –" _

"The robot killed him!" Prim howled, as if from behind a hand. "HE'S DE-E-AD!"

He heard the sisters fighting, the sound of stormy sobs – the comm link toppled over, and it must've fallen outside because he suddenly heard the frantic whine of police sirens, resounding crashes and booms – a faint, terrifying robotic voice speaking somewhere beyond the noise, followed by sharply cut-off screams. "Katniss? KATNISS! PRIMROSE!"

The sound of a blockage covered their speaker, followed by rushing air and the slam of a window shutting. The outside cacophony was shut off - the only sound was soft, laboured sobs. "KATNISS!" he repeated, livid. The pungent rose pinned to his lapel flapped as he stood up behind the desk, and he could hear his men outside starting to mutter to each other. "Are you there?! WHO has been KILLED?!"

In the sudden quiet, Katniss's voice was unspeakably sad.

"Uncle Tony."

_One minute._

The Master is a man of simple pleasures. Daytime telly. Hot tea. Widespread death and destruction. Y'know, the usual.

The Dalek in front of him pants softly, which would be a remarkable feat for a robot unequipped with a tongue or lungs, but the inner casing has been gently peeled open (well, gently enough. You can bandy about metaphors of using a chainsaw to open a tin can all you want, but the Master was never at a disadvantage for lack of creativity) and the floppy, cauliflower-coloured organism inside is currently being subjected to the higher echelons of careful torture, an area which the maniacal Time Lord specialized _spectacularly_.

"Caan," he says, genially. "This really doesn't have to continue." A thick trickle of dark blood pulses gently out of Caan's eye socket – the surgically removed capillaries only barely are able to focus on the small, suited man. His sharp face smiles. His eyes do not. "Just one little insignificant piece of information, and I'll save you from the imminent wrath of your comrades."

Outside, the faint _Isnaikinti_s of newly Void-freed Daleks reverberated through the UNIT compound. The Master flickered an eye over the home-made cloaking equipment shielding the room from attacks – it fizzed and burped against the assault of Skaro technology, but it held.

"I – I can-not." Caan said. Slowly. Laboriously. They've only been at this for two hours and the spoilsport has already started to give up.

"Yes you can!" The Master encourages. The – ahem – _interrogation room_ – is floored in deep blue carpet, and when he hops over the table of stained ballpoint pens (which doubled wonderfully for implements of torture) his shoes sink into the pile. The Lithuanian sun is just beginning to climb, and cold light dapples his neat, dark hair. His screwdriver, improved with his newly-found friend's modifications, thrums eagerly in his palm. He rocks back on his heels a moment; closes his eyes; breathes_. _The thick, soupy air soaks into his double pump (the double beat, the double tap, dum _da da_) and he is _alive. _

In the vortex, air wasn't so much at a loss rather than a complete nonentity. The stars were so beautiful, though. They sang to him the song of the drums and rocked him in his agony towards his destiny; an Earth solar system planet, of course, _of course_, and it was true Saturn wore its Hula Hoops with great grace, but its moon, it seemed, was far more interesting than the ponderous giant. Oh yes. So interesting.

He seizes Caan by one slimy dreadlock and, carefully, squeezes. The fine, fibrous membrane of nerves coating the Dalek's inner tissues inflame and burn, and the creature that was created to never feel breaks under the burden of its relentless pain. "P-PLEASE," Caan wails, squirming. "PLEASE."

Pain does things to a soul dignity has no barriers to. It eats and burrows and leaves you empty, then fills you up again with so many sensations a body has no preparations to suffer. Caan broke officially ten minutes ago, but a little extra fiddling never hurt. Well. Never hurt _him_.

Caan's organs clench beneath his fingers and he lets go before he atrophies. The Dalek's spasms have been entertaining, but now the whimpering soundtrack is getting boring, and he needs to get this over with before those lovely UNIT soldiers find out their prized possession has _not_ been under interrogation from their– currently lifeless – captain lying prone beside the water cooler. Although the battleground of Cybermen v. Daleks _has_ so far distracted the scrawny pink bipeds. The Master hunkers down and puts on his best you-can-trust-me expression.

"Caan," he intones, his voice seductively empathetic. "My dear, dear cephalopod, tell me who has the Arkenstone and I will SAVE you."

Caan raises his mutilated form – he watches his fellow alien with an eye filled with precognition. The last of the Dalek kind. The Master ignores the glaring irony of the situation and, grinning impishly, begins to spin his screwdriver slowly between his fingers. Caan winces; shifts. From a place deep within, Caan wheezes the name he knows places destruction into The Master's fingertips.

The Master cocks his head, leans closer. Caan, straining, whispers it again.

"_Thranduil._"

Smiling, The Master pats Caan's head fondly, then punches his fist through the Dalek's socket. Rising and wiping the gore on his trousers, the Master whistles – not only because he just killed the last remnant of the race that wiped out his, oh sweet sweet redemption – and walks calmly out the door, through the wreckage of dying soldiers, towards the sleek craft pulled up on the roof. The Titan spaceship was small but functional, and his chauffeur pulls away gracefully from the outcrop as the compound began to buckle. Huge pot-bellied reactor flames seared the Earth, and a pulse of cosmic energy climbs from the sky, like an outstretched hand.

"_You could be brilliant." His eyes, kind and dark, burn his, suns imploding, stars fracturing, planets tearing themselves to ashes. They're the kind of eyes you get caught into, sucked into an orbit. "We could do it, just you and me." _

His hands are on his knees and his eyelashes flutter. He feels like a blank spot, a vacancy, To Let: One Time-Lord mind, ba-ba-ba-_bum_, ba-ba-ba-_BAM_. Veins and capillaries popping and the bloody wet dark – he sometimes thinks that Rassilon's fist pounds against the backs of his lids themselves, and one day they'll punch through. Against the backdrop of the end of humanity, The Master reclines as general of the worst war of Earth history, and he brushes it off. He didn't need him, after all.

_Or did he_

_He still dreams of him _

_His skin and teeth and lashes_

_Those sideburns _

_The __**warmth **_

The Master laughs, the full sound filling the ridged arches of the ship, and the hysteria scratches the surface.

_Thirty seconds, and a broken heart._

Loki is lain in bed. His hair rustles darkly on the pillow like a bolt of spilled silk – the finest furs of the realm wrap his hips, the spoilt prince of always, thriving in luxury and the work of others. He is a study in expensive, lucrative charm. In sleep, his petulant mouth is one calm line.

But along the rich white of his back, Jotun tattoos have started to climb the incline, blue dappling and unfurling like ice crystalizing on glass. They thrum; those of his lineage have always sensed danger with their flesh than their fears, and his blood does not fail him now, as it has always done – Loki wakes to see the window, its arched gape depicting Alfheim, with all its marble spires and unending forests, and, silhouetted in the pane a slight, gowned woman; his wife, mother of his sons, companion to his solitude. Sigyn.

He feels a stir of sleepy annoyance. Sigyn disobeys him often, but she has never denied him the rights of her company in bed. She has clearly found him visiting her in her adopted home (an impromptu visit – Thor's sickening display with his pliant wife and children were grating, and he had started to find his bed was significantly colder without the presence of a familiar other) and she has not bothered to wake him, even to shrug off her tunic and curl beside him – her back is to him and he starts to call her to him. Sees the tattoos glittering in his skin. Stops.

As if sensing his sudden, shocked distress she turns with her characteristic alien fluidity, and he is shocked to see that she has stripped herself bare – not that her body is unclothed, as he has seen it – prefers it – but that her black hair is not smooth but twists like smoke, untamed by her usual meticulous brushing, and although her grey eyes are aflame they are wreathed in deep shadows. Wealth suits her face but she now she wears none, none of the trinkets she has always worn since she was found half-dead in a glade, accepted eventually at court as advisor to the queen, previously foreign in her dress and manners; but the Vanir of Alfheim accepted her and so she loves to cluster their wealth into the thick, heavy masses of her hair, into braids anointed with gold, silver to trim her gowns and capes, obsidian, to sheath her fine long neck in, clasp her wrists, curl around her ears. Nothing hangs on her now, and he knows, something is wrong.

She loves the earth – one of the few loves she lets him see, shadows and secrets that she is. (He remembers, how intriguing he had regarded her, even those first few months, when she had allowed his curious presence in her business as commander and sustainer of the massive Alfheim trees still yet uncharted, and yet how familiar when her resounding voice controlled the legions in her charge that surveyed and explored and returned the power of the woods in her hands, as efficiently as flower and thorn alike bowed to her touch. She fills rooms with tall red grasses caught with berries and plump, dry branches in free-standing vases, anoints her skin with their perfumes and crushes their pulps into her flesh to keep it soft and full and pleasing).

And yet no flower is in this bare, unhappy room, he finally sees, having not felt much but exhaustion when he finally completed his long journey from Asgard and was led swiftly to his wife's chamber, with only the presence of mind to strip his leathers and collapse in the sheets. She observes his deductions with insurmountable gravity, with conflicted fidelity, with perceptible restraint; and although he knows this as her character he feels with a rush that horrible certainty that sometimes he loved a shadow of a woman, that only through the intimacy of their shared, brilliant intelligence and her own pain she refuses to share and his loving that he will never speak of that Sigyn, his wife, has grown to be something more alien to Loki than she ever was, that she is his almost-companion and always-friend.

And yet he sees Sigyn is weeping, and he does not know why, and he is afraid.

And, he finally sees, she clasps the small, sleeping forms of their sons in her arms, and her tears cling to their dark heads.

And "Oh my love," she says, and he shivers, because that emotion scarcely found hold in Sigyn's words – she had said it, of course, to him, and sometimes it was true, but sometimes it was with the voice of one that had often said it and felt it and thought it and lived it, in another time, to another. "Why did I leave you?"

He feels fear, sick terror, fill his stomach, because she is not speaking to him. His silver tongue unravels – his voice breaks on his words. "What are you talking about? You're not leaving. You haven't left." He feels his pupils expand into an iris of Jotun red – he blinks through them and suddenly, outside, it is starting to snow.

Sigyn's eyes focus on him; her pointed Vanir ears break the fall of her hair, and as it passes down to her waist he sees suddenly the gold-green wedding band he had bound her finger with lying on the windowsill, where it never has left her skin before. He feels like he's falling. The ring is shaded with the reflections of the soft, light clumps falling from the sky, and, with a rush of realization, that it is not snow. She looks at him.

"Sigyn?" he whispers.

A tall man straddling a stallion rears suddenly behind the window, the window passed over with ash - _the breath of a funeral pyre_, his father said at Frigga's funeral, and he remembers Sigyn kissing him hard with a shaking mouth hot like coals – and, just like that, she fades – and is gone.

_Ten seconds._

Peggy still jerks with the aftershock of the Cyberman's blow. Steve, across the destroyed room with his chest blown open, reaches fruitlessly with a shaking arm. Peggy can still see him, of a sort, but as her vision cuts off; this is no gentle fading, as her burnt, sizzling flesh can testify; she sees him. But she is still alive, and she can be saved, if it is quick, it is now.

Bucky – Bucky who had come back home, and her heart dances even as it is breaking – has not seen her yet, underneath the kitchen sink filled with her blood, but he will see her, soon, when he lifts his wailing head from Steve's lolling corpse and sees the pool of chestnut hair. At the same time, he hears Rose screaming upstairs. He must make a choice.

There are robots that walk the earth, and there are men with metal arms. They are not one and the same.

Bucky Barnes stands, and lifts Peggy against his chest.

_Nine._

_Eight._

_Seven._

_Six._

"You are –" Thor begins to say to his son, but Heimdall grabs Thorin around the waist from where he is crouched beside his wounded father, and throws him into the breaking Bifrost, and all he can do is watch as his sweet son, not four summers old, be cleaved asunder forever, from him. A portly missionary from Westeros washes his hands nervously beside the portal to his home, and when he takes Daenerys the baby cries for her mother. Thor swallows the tides roiling inside of him and smiles comfortingly, his dimples coated with sweat.

Jane gives a weak moan and shudders – he is still watching the cloud of cosmos whirling away from him by the time he realizes she has died.

Asgard trembles; the paths to Westeros and Middle Earth close, and Thor is alone.

_Five._

_Four._

_Three._

_Two._

_One._

_Two weeks later._

"His name is Peter." he says, and Mary Fitzpatrick; childless, lonely, nomadic Mary; takes the toddler from the man.

She does not question why he has emerged, bruised and smelling of copper from the woods, because his eyes are sad and empty and she does not want to leave this fresh-faced, sleeping little boy in the care of a ghost. Her car, parked on the edge of the forest where the CIA had picked up a bunch of refugees from New York – god knows, in the aftermath of hell on Earth, every survivor could not be chased down on account of the aliens rampaging the towns, but she was tired and grateful for a reprieve, and Richard had taken her clipboard from her and told her _Go._

The man starts to weave back between the trees, to the dull-faced group waiting for him in the forest below.

"Wait!" she says, and, although he does not turn round, he stops, the back of his faded blue T-shirt drawn tight over muscles once taut and strong, now sagging with the silent grief that weighed them. "We need to register you all with the force. We'll need your nam – "

"Tell him, won't you?" she stops. "Tell him his parents loved him. More than anything. I saw them. I know."

Rhodey, wifeless, daughterless, sinks back into the dark woods, and soon the only sign he was ever there was the woman stood just outside of the tree-barred cage, staring wordlessly into the thick grey of the inside cavern.

A moment later, she hears the gunshots.


End file.
